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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Wow, based on that study masks are way less effective than I thought. They couldn't find any significant impact on COVID from cloth masks, even though the study was quite large. And increasing usage of surgical masks by 30 pp reduced the number of cases by 10% - which is pretty good, but still not nearly the numbers I've seen floating around, especially when considering that villages with masks also had increased social distancing.

Not to say that the mask mandates were entirely useless, at least for indoors (outdoor masking seems kind of pointless), but it doesn't seem like they are as significant as we thought.

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I am starting to believe that the biggest effect of masks was (is) to remind people to stay distant, which does seem to have useful effects.

At the cost of touching their face, build-up of funkiness (it isn't like they put on a new mask all the time), unwarranted confidence.

> At the cost of touching their face

I assume you mean while putting on or removing the mask.

But, anecdotally, I've noticed that wearing the mask seems to inhibit high-risk touching behaviors (extreme examples would be nose-picking and fingernail biting).

I suspect that people wear masks as protection and linger around in closed of spaces too long. Masks are probably good for suggesting big aerosols but the small ones will linger in the air.

Most people around here seem to hate wearing their mask and look for any excuse to remove it. If that means moving to a less risky area, that seems like a desirable outcome.

That was my take.

When this first hit I quickly read every mask study I could find, typically concerning flu transmission.

My rule of thumb immediately became that it's pretty much useless outside of N95 masks...which luckily I already had a case of for use in my shop. Most people appear to wear the functional equivalent of a sock, oft times with their nose showing.

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